My primary research interests concern the ethics, politics, and aesthetics of cultural heritage, art, and the environment. I have published papers on topics including repatriation, historic preservation, landscape art, cultural appropriation, irreplaceability, authenticity, place-loss due to climate change, and the value of history and heritage. For an overview of these topics, you can check out my entry on the Ethics of Cultural Heritage in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.  

Writing for a general audience:

• Contribution to the roundtable "'So Bad It's Good': How to Love Bad Movies" on Matt Strohl's book Why It's OK to Love Bad Movies, Aesthetics for Birds, 4/14/22

• "Love the art, disgusted by the artist? Maybe philosophy can help," Psyche, 3/14/22

• "Can We Still Bump n' Grind to R. Kelly?" Zócalo Public Square, 11/29/21

  • Featured as a Zócalo favorite essay of 2021.

• "How fake things can still help us learn," OUP Blog, 3/6/20

• My top 5 TV shows of the decade (not really philosophy, but whatevs, they called me a TV expert!!), Aesthetics for Birds, 12/17/19

• Five Philosophers Discuss "Joker," Aesthetics for Birds, 10/22/19

• "Saving lives or saving stones? Two sides of the same coin?" Heritage in War Blog, 2/12/19

• "Artworld Roundtable: Can Today's Artists Still Sell Out?" Aesthetics for Birds, 9/13/18

• "Artworld Roundtable: Is Cultural Appropriation Ever Okay?" Aesthetics for Birds, 8/22/18

• "Can Nicki Minaj's "Chun-Li" be Cultural Appropriation?" Aesthetics for Birds, 7/11/18

• "Are We Living in a Horror Movie?" The Spoke, 10/31/17

• "Why museums need their own ethics departments," Apollo Magazine, 9/4/17

• "Black Market Art: How to Restore Ethics to the Antiquities World" (with Liza Oliver), WBUR's Cognoscenti, 4/24/17

• "Digital replicas are not soulless – they help us engage with art," Apollo Magazine, 3/24/17 

• "Palmyra's ruins can rebuild our relationship with history," Aeon Magazine, 3/8/17

  • Featured in the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage's "Folklife Friday," "a selection of the week's best cultural heritage pieces."

  • Winner of the APA Public Philosophy Op-Ed contest, 2018

Papers on the Ethics, Politics, and Aesthetics of Heritage (art, environment, and otherwise):

• "Intrinsic and Universal Value in Heritage Ethics" forthcoming in The Routledge Handbook of Heritage Ethics [draft]

  • The contemporary heritage ethics literature often adopts a critical attitude towards the ideas of intrinsic value and universal value. Intrinsic (inherent, innate) value is criticized for ignoring the social dimensions of cultural heritage and fetishizing material heritage; universal value is criticized for facilitating imperialism and colonialism in the management of cultural heritage. While there are important dimensions to these critiques, particularly with respect to how these value concepts have been employed in practice, they also tend to depend on narrow interpretations of the concepts at hand that can obscure their more salutary aspects for heritage ethics. In this chapter, I will draw on philosophical work on intrinsic and universal value to illustrate the important role that these concepts can play in heritage ethics, while remaining wary about their potential pitfalls.

• "Cultural Appropriation and Oppression," Philosophical Studies, Vol. 176, No. 4 (2019): 1003-1013. [draft]

  • In this paper, I present an outline of the oppression account of cultural appropriation and argue that it offers the best explanation for the wrongfulness of the varied and complex cases of appropriation to which people often object. I then compare the oppression account with the intimacy account defended by C. Thi Nguyen and Matt Strohl. Though I believe that Nguyen and Strohl’s account offers important insight into an essential dimension of the cultural appropriation debate, I argue that justified objections to cultural appropriation must ultimately be grounded in considerations of oppression as opposed to group intimacy. 

• "Environmental Heritage and the Ruins of the Future," in Ruins, Monuments, and Memorials: Philosophical Perspectives on Artifact and Memory, ed. Carolyn Korsmeyer, Jeanette Bicknell, and Jennifer Judkins. Routledge, 2019. [draft]

  • We now have good reason to worry that many coastal cities will be flooded by the end of the century. How should we confront this possibility (or inevitability)? What attitudes should we adopt to impending inundation of such magnitude? In the case of place-loss due to anthropogenic climate change, I argue that there may ultimately be something fitting about letting go, both thinking prospectively, when the likelihood of preservation is bleak, and retrospectively, when we reflect on our inability to prevent destruction. I then explore some of the ethical complications of this response.

• "Who Owns Up to the Past? Heritage and Historical Injustice," Journal of the American Philosophical Association, Vol 4, No. 1 (2018): 87-104.

  • ‘Heritage’ is a concept that often carries significant normative weight in moral and political argument. In this article, I present and critique a prevalent conception according to which heritage must have a positive valence. I argue that this view of heritage leads to two moral problems: Disowning Injustice and Embracing Injustice. In response, I argue for an alternative conception of heritage that promises superior moral and political consequences. In particular, this alternative jettisons the traditional focus on heritage as a primarily positive relationship to the past, and thus offers resources for coming to terms with histories of injustice.

• "Authenticity and the Aesthetic Experience of History," Analysis, Vo. 78, No. 4 (October 2018): 649-657. [draft]. 

  • In this paper, I argue that norms of artistic and aesthetic authenticity that prioritize material origins foreclose on broader opportunities for aesthetic experience: particularly, for the aesthetic experience of history. I focus on Carolyn Korsmeyer’s recent articles in defense of the aesthetic value of genuineness and argue that her rejection of the aesthetic significance of historical value is mistaken. Rather, I argue that recognizing the aesthetic significance of historical value points the way towards rethinking the dominance of the very norms of authenticity that Korsmeyer endeavors to defend and explain.

• "'Saving Lives or Saving Stones?' The Ethics of Cultural Heritage Protection in War," Public Affairs Quarterly, Vol. 32, No. 1 (January 2018): 67-84 .

  • In discussion surrounding the destruction of cultural heritage in armed conflict, one often hears two important claims in support of intervention to safeguard cultural heritage. The first is that the protection of people and the protection of heritage are two sides of the same coin. The second is that the cultural heritage of any people is part of the common heritage of all humankind. In this article, I examine both of these claims, and consider the extent to which they align with the current practices that they are intended to justify. 

• "Repatriation and the Radical Redistribution of Art," Ergo, Vol. 4, No. 32 (December, 2017): 931-953. [final pdf archived here as well]

  • Museums are home to millions of artworks and cultural artifacts, some of which have made their way to these institutions through unjust means. Some argue that these objects should be repatriated (i.e. returned to their country or culture of origin). However, these arguments face a series of philosophical challenges. In particular, repatriation, even if justified, is often portrayed as contrary to the aims and values of museums. However, in this paper, I argue that some of the very considerations museums appeal to in order to oppose repatriation claims can be turned on their heads and marshaled in favor of the practice. In addition to defending against objections to repatriation, this argument yields the surprising conclusion that the redistribution of cultural goods should be much more radical than is typically supposed.

• "The Ethics of Historic Preservation," Philosophy Compass, Vol. 11, No. 12 (December 2016): 786-794 [draft]

  • This article draws together research from various sub-disciplines of philosophy to offer an overview of recent philosophical work on the ethics of historic preservation. I discuss how philosophers writing about art, culture, and the environment have appealed to historical significance in crafting arguments about the preservation of objects, practices, and places. By demonstrating how it relates to core themes in moral and political philosophy, I argue that historic preservation is essentially concerned with ethical issues. 

• "Cultural Appropriation Without Cultural Essentialism?" Social Theory and Practice, Vol 42, No.2 (April 2016): 343-366. [draft]

  • Is there something morally wrong with cultural appropriation in the arts? In this paper, I argue that the little philosophical work on this topic has been overly dismissive of moral objections to cultural appropriation. Nevertheless, I argue that philosophers have developed powerful conceptual tools that can aid in our understanding of objections that have been levied by other scholars and artists. I demonstrate this by bringing the literature on cultural appropriation into dialogue with recent philosophical work on harmful speech and epistemic injustice. I then consider a further philosophical problem for objections to cultural appropriation: namely, that they can seem to embroil us in harmful forms of cultural essentialism. I argue that focusing on the systematic nature of appropriative harms may allow us to sidestep the problem of essentialism, but not without cost.

• "Impersonal Value, Universal Value, and the Scope of Cultural Heritage," Ethics, Vol. 125, No. 4 (July 2015): 999-1027. [pdf]

  • Philosophers have used the terms ‘impersonal’ and ‘personal value’ to refer to, among other things, whether something’s value is universal or particular to an individual. In this paper, I propose an account of impersonal value that, I argue, better captures the intuitive distinction than potential alternatives, while providing conceptual resources for moving beyond the traditional stark dichotomy. I illustrate the practical importance of my theoretical account with reference to debate over the evaluative scope of cultural heritage. 

• "History, Value, and Irreplaceability," Ethics, Vol. 124, No. 1 (October 2013): 35-64. [pdf]

  • It is often assumed that there is a necessary relationship between historical value and irreplaceability, and that this is an essential feature of historical value’s distinctive character. Contrary to this assumption, I argue that it is a merely contingent fact that some historically valuable things are irreplaceable, and that irreplaceability is not a distinctive feature of historical value at all. Rather, historically significant objects, from heirlooms to artifacts, offer us an otherwise impossible connection with the past, a value that persists even in the face of suitable replacements.

    • Featured for discussion at PEA Soup with critical précis by Carolyn Korsmeyer

    • Errata: The first occurrence of "species E" in footnote 49 should read "species A."

Papers on Immoral Artists:

• • "Immoral Artists" in The Oxford Handbook of Ethics and Art, ed. James Harold, 2023. [draft]

    • This chapter offers an overview of issues posed by the problem of immoral artists, artists who in word or deed violate commonly held moral principles. I briefly consider the question of whether the immorality of an artist can render their work aesthetically worse (making connections to chapters in the Theory section of the handbook), and then turn to questions about what the audience should do and feel in response to knowledge of these moral failings. I discuss questions such as whether audiences have reason not to purchase or consume work by these artists, whether their shows and exhibitions should be canceled, and how fans might grapple with the emotional turmoil they feel when artists whom they love act or speak in ways that are morally condemnable.

  • "Immoral Artists and Our Aesthetic Projects: A Commentary on Mary Beth Willard's Why It's OK to Enjoy the Work of Immoral Artists," British Journal of Aesthetics, Vol. 62, No. 4 (2022): 517-525

    • This essay discusses Mary Beth Willard's Why It's OK to Enjoy the Work of Immoral Artists and puts it into dialogue with my book Drawing the Line. In particular, I focus on the role of aesthetic projects in thinking about artistic immorality, and develop further thoughts on the public/private and individual/social distinctions with respect to our engagement with the arts.

  • "How Museums and Arts Institutions Can Deal with the Problem of Immoral Artists: A Response to Willard," British Journal of Aesthetics, Vol. 62, No. 4 (2022): 559-566.

    • In this essay, I respond to Mary Beth Willard's commentary on Drawing the Line. I focus on responding to a number of questions and objections that Willard poses concerning the role of arts institutions in addressing the problem of immoral artists. Focusing on the case of museums in particular, I defend the idea that they can exercise their power to play a productive and important role in societal conversations about moral criticism of artists.

  • "Paul Gauguin's Manao Tupapau (Spirit of the Dead Watching) (1892)," in Bloomsbury Contemporary Aesthetics, ed. Darren Hudson Hick.

    • This paper uses Gauguin's painting Manao Tupapau (Spirit of the Dead Watching) (1892) as a case study to orient the reader to recent philosophical work on the moral criticism of both artworks and artists.

Papers on other topics concerning Art and/or the Environment:

• "Beauty and Love of Place" forthcoming in The Routledge Handbook of Nature and Environmental Aesthetics [draft]

  • This chapter explores the role of aesthetics in love of place. I argue that aesthetic appreciation is a necessary component of place-love, one that influences and is influenced by the other affective, cognitive, and evaluative aspects of loving a place. This understanding of place-love has a role to play in cultivating aesthetic community, breaking us free from anthropocentric biases, and building resilience in the face of loss and change.

• "Portraits of the Landscape," in Portraits and Philosophy, ed. Hans Maes. Routledge, 2020. [draft]

  • Portraits are defined in part by their aim to reveal and represent the “character” of a person. Because landscapes are typically viewed as lacking an “inner life,” one might assume that landscapes cannot be the subject of portraiture. However, in this essay, I argue that landscape artwork can share in portraiture’s goal of capturing character, and indeed presents us with essential tools for revealing the often ineffable character of place. 

• "The Clean Plate Club? Food Waste and Individual Responsibility" (with Jaclyn Hatala Matthes) [draft],  in The Oxford Handbook of Food Ethics, ed. Anne Barnhill, Mark Budolfson, and Tyler Doggett (New York: Oxford University press, 2018): 313-330.

  • We offer an overview of both the empirical literature on food waste and philosophical work on the concept of waste. We use this background to argue that an overemphasis on the reduction of individual food waste is misleading at best, and pernicious at worst, in combatting the substantial problems that global food waste creates. Rather, we argue that civic engagement and political activism aimed at institutional reform will be essential in addressing these problems.

Papers on other general topics in Moral and Political Philosophy:

•  "Love in Spite of," in Oxford Studies in Normative Ethics, Vol. 6 (USA: Oxford University Press, 2016): 241-262 [draft]

  • Consider two commonly cited requirements of love. The first is that we should love people for who they are. The second is that loving people should involve concern for their well-being. But what happens when an aspect of someone’s identity conflicts with her well-being? In examining this question, I develop an account of loving someone in spite of something. Although there are cases where loving in spite of is merited, I argue that we generally do wrong to love people in spite of who they are, even where it appears that some aspect of their identity is in tension with their well-being.

• "On the Democratic Value of Distrust," Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy, December 2015.

  • In her paper "(White) Tyranny and the Democratic Value of Distrust," Meena Krishnamurthy argues that distrust has a political value that has often been overlooked by democratic theorists. She pursues this argument by developing an account of distrust from Martin Luther King Jr. and exploring the role that King's distrust played in the Black Civil Rights Movement. In this discussion note, I argue that an alternative account of distrust from recent work by Katherine Hawley can better capture distrust's democratic value, and moreover might reveal how that value is noninstrumental, in contrast with the contingent and instrumental value granted to distrust on Krishnamurthy's account.